II. THE ANATOMY OF EDUCATIONAL VIDEO Each of the online courses that can be delivered via the internet to screens and speakers around the world—whether about poetry, film, finance, computer programming, public speaking, psychology, biology, history, politics, English, or any of the other subjects out there 22 —and whether produced by a large or small or public or private institution, represents centuries of technological innovation and advances in teaching and learning. Their media composition (about which more in a moment) reflects that rich history. Were there a knobby little MOOC branch on the education and communications tree of life, we would be able to see its evolution in media and communications phylogenesis dating way back— back through OER and its founding, back to older educational video production and earlier educational broadcasting and public radio, back even to earlier distance education. 23 MOOCs themselves, however, as a self-standing phenomenon are less than a decade old. While teachers—of university courses in particular—have sought to connect with and to the outside world for teaching purposes for a long time, the very first MOOC, by all accounts from master educator and online learning advocate George Siemens, bore the DNA helix—the genetic instructions for a MOOC—that all of its successors would carry. Siemens’s 2008 course was itself about connected knowledge, and thus, rather trippily, a kind of meta project. While it ran across sophisticated webs of RSS feeds and blog posts and meet-ups in Second Life and Moodle, at its core were thousands 22 http://www.onlinecoursereport.com/the-50-most-popular-moocs-of-all-time/ 23 For more history, see Paul Saettler, The Evolution of Educational Technology (Greenwich: Information Age Publishing, 2004); Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, eds., Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Peter B. Kaufman, “Visual Education and the University of the Air,” presentation at the Content in Motion 2015 EUscreen annual meeting, Warsaw, Poland, December 4, 2015, online now at: http://blog. euscreen.eu/warsaw-conference and http://blog.euscreen.eu/archives/8207. A tree of life—http:// www.amnh.org/exhibitions/darwin/evolution-today/how-do-we-know-living-things-are-related/ tree-of-life/; https://www.nsf.gov/bio/pubs/reports/atol.pdf—for MOOCs would be interesting. See, for a start: http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/cetisli/2015/05/11/moocs-and-open-education-timelineupdated/. Lest there be any doubt that everything old is new again, the 1910s and 1920s saw a rush of new organizations being formed to explore new moving-image technology for teaching and learning—among them, the National Academy of Visual Instruction, the Visual Instruction Association of America, the Society for Visual Education, and the National Education Association Department of Visual Instruction. The editors of the inaugural issue of Visual Education said: “We believe that the future awaiting the present efforts toward visual education will be more brilliant than the dreams of its most ardent devotees. Undoubtedly, much of the prophecy now being uttered so freely on all sides will prove to have been either false or gravely misdirected. But the future will come—as the future always does—and it will bring to American education great benefit or untold harm to us according as it is moulded by the sound judgments of educational experts or by the bungling hands of enthusiastic tyros.” “Foreword,” Visual Education 1, No. 1 (1920), p. 6. II. THE ANATOMY OF EDUCATIONAL VIDEO 13